Briar Lane Homemade Fudge – Product Review

So a week or three back (I’m old, my memory is failing so cut me some slack), I posted a long-needed update to my resources page including a link to what may have seemed like an odd entry: Briar Lane Jams and Jellies. It’s a company up north run by an online buddy that produces old-school recipe jams, jellies and importantly, fudge.

I know I know, this is a site about body recomposition. But I’m also the one who literally wrote the book on flexible dieting and have been a proponent of such far longer than just about anybody else. All foods can have their place in a diet so long as you don’t go stupid and eat nothing but junk (someday I will write something about the current trends in flexible dieting and IIFYM but today is not that day). More importantly, despite having literally decades now of eating as an athlete, I still have a sweet tooth. And I love fudge. I always have, both the thick gooey kind and the fluffy marshmallow kind. When I was back in Salt Lake City, I’d go to the annual state fair primarily to get a big old hunk of fair fudge. Yeah.

And today I want to tell you about the fudge that I had sent to me by Briar Lane. Since I like all kinds of fudge, I was sent pure chocolate, peanut butter chocolate and something I actually wasn’t familiar with called penuche. This is what arrived in the mailbox (yes, I took pictures).

The boxes were clearly hand packaged and signed, already a sign of folks who actually care about the quality of their product. And the fudge was packed in sandwich bags, assuring me that they had been hand packed before mailing. I wasn’t sure where to start but eagerly opened up the boxes to see what was inside. To no one’s surprise, it was big blocks of fudge. Awesome.

I opted to start with the plain chocolate first, just, I dunno, it seemed appropriate. There’s not a whole lot to say here except that it was absolutely delicious. Some fudge is too gooey and sticky and the marshmallowy stuff can actually be a bit too light and fluffy sometimes. But this was a perfect balance between the two. Solid, thick, but without being heavy or excessively, I dunno, fudgey if that makes sense. It was sweet without being too sweet and chocolately without being overwhelmingly so. Just a perfect plain chocolate.

Next up was the peanut butter and chocolate. This is an absolute favorite of mine. Before I got too severely lactose intolerant, I used to love Peanut Butter and Chocolate Ice Cream from Baskin Robbins: the combination is just utterly amazing. And the peanut butter and chocolate fudge didn’t disappoint. Sometimes this combination is overwhelmed by too much peanut butter or gets too gooey in the middle but once again, Briar Lane didn’t disappoint. There was just the right amount of peanut butter to give it a perfect flavor without overwhelming the chocolate. And there was no gooey center, this wasn’t a case where plain fudge was “wrapped around” peanut butter as is sometimes done. It’s mixed evenly and perfectly and the taste never varies where you get a mouthful of chocolate and a mouthful of peanut butter separately.

Finally was the penuche, again something I wasn’t familiar with previously. If you didn’t read the Wiki entry,

And that sort of describes it accurately. It had a vanilla taste to it (not my personal favorite) and was a little on the sweet side. Which is odd coming from me given that have been known to eat multiple Cadbury Creme Eggs in a sitting. Personally, I’d be more likely to stick with the plain chocolate or chocolate and peanut butter but that’s just me: if you’re a fan of penuche, I have absolute confidence that this will be some of the best you’ve ever tasted.

And that’s it: all three products, even the one that wasn’t my personal favorite, are absolutely top notch. The flavor and sweetness is spot on, the texture of the fudge is the perfect mix of thick without being heavy or gooey and if you’re a fudge lover like me (man that sounds wrong), I can’t too highly recommend this product. I’m not personally a big jam and jelly person so I can’t comment on those products from Briar Lane but I have no doubt that they are just as excellent and high-quality as the fudge.

So stop reading and go check out their site and order something already.